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This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I’ve made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won’t have to repeat those mistakes.

In a society that increasingly rewards specialists and narrowness, Web publishing is one of the few fields left where the generalist is valuable. To make a great site, you need to know a little bit about writing, photography, publishing, Unix system administration, relational database management systems (RDBMS), user interface design, and computer programming. I have thus assumed no specific technical background among my readers and have tried to make the text self-contained.

Chapters include:

Envisioning a site that won’t be featured in suck.com

So you want to join the world’s grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs

IBM Redbooks are developed and published by the IBM International Technical Support Organization, ITSO. The ITSO develops and delivers skills, technical know-how, and materials to IBM technical professionals, Business Partners, clients, and the marketplace in general.

The ITSO works with IBM Divisions and Business Partners in the process of developing IBM Redbooks, Redpapers, Technotes, workshops, and other materials. The ITSO is part of the IBM Global Content Services organization within IBM Sales & Distribution.

IBM Redbooks are the ITSO’s core product. They typically provide positioning and value guidance, installation and implementation experiences, typical solution scenarios, and step-by-step “how-to” guidelines. They often include sample code and other support materials that are also available as downloads.

This book is intended to help the reader better understand the role of analysis and design in the object-oriented software development process. Experiments to use structured analysis and design as precursors to an object-oriented implementation have failed. The descriptions produced by the structured methods partition reality along the wrong dimensions. Classes are not recognized and inheritance as an abstraction mechanism is not exploited.

However, we are fortunate that a multitude of object-oriented analysis and design methods have emerged and are still under development. Core OO notions have found their home place in the analysis phase. Abstraction and specialization via inheritance, originally advertised as key ingredients of OO programming, have been abstracted into key ingredients of OO analysis (OOA). Analysis-level property inheritance maps smoothly on the behavior inheritance of the programming realm.

While the book is mostly self-contained, people report that it does not serve as an introductory OO text. It helps to have had some previous exposure to basic OO concepts.

In any software development project, many developers contribute changes over a period of time. Using a version control system to track and manage these changes is vital to the continued success of the project. This book introduces you to Subversion, a free, open-source version control system, which is both more powerful and much less complex than its predecessor CVS.

In this practical, hands-on guide, you will learn how to use Subversion and how to effectively merge a version control system within your development process. As a seasoned Subversion user, William Nagel draws on lessons learned through trial and error, providing useful tips for accomplishing tasks that arise in day-to-day software development.

Nagel clearly explains how to expand on the built-in abilities of Subversion, making the system work better for you. He organizes Subversion commands by activity to allow for quick task reference. Using example scripts and configurations, he also includes development approaches that you can customize to fit your own environment.

Format: online HTML, (print edition available for purchase at amazon.com)

Price: free (print edition $19.77)

User interface design is straightforward, easy, and most of all fun. There is no reason to be afraid. It is all about making people happy by providing them with what they expect. The rules are simple, and all you have to do is follow them. This book will explain what those rules are, so you can design user interfaces that work and behave as expected and cause less frustration to the user.

Chapters include:

Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy

Figuring Out What They Expected

Choices

Affordances and Metaphors

Consistency and Other Hobgoblins

Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives

Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives, Part Two

Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives, Part Three